Jimi Green – 3D art and animation student @ Design Centre Enmore

Animation – Assessment 1- Process Diary – Week 2

Week 2 animation class was mostly about gesture and personality. Using zombies as our study, we discussed how to give characters personality and the importance of studying how a character would act and move.
We all got up from our seats and acted like zombies. There was two reasons for this-

1/ Animation is acting. Physically acting out the performance of the character you are trying to animate is vital. Only then do you understand the subtleties of how it moves and what motivates him or her.
2/ Because it really funny.

Once we had all decided what kind of a zombie we will be when the apocalypse comes, it was time for pen and paper. We each sketched our zombies in simple gestures to illustrate the performance and determine key poses.

The second part of the class was a bit more technical, an overview of the graph editor – Maya’s key animation tool-set. Mostly we looked at the differences between the different ‘tangents’ and how they affect the flow of an animation.
As homework, we were asked to study some footage of a bouncing ball and try to re-create it in maya, making use of what we learned about tangents.

This is what I came up with, just a quick ‘first pass’ animation. I used a simple ‘squash and stretch’ rig-